A game where the "engine"(1) is released as OS (but not Free as in the GPL, because the company has to be able to incorporate changes from the game's OS community back into their commercial offering), but the game's content, both graphics and audio and plot-line, characters, etc, etc, are still controlled by the company.
Now, how much fun is it to play a game where you basically sit back and watch the action, rather than being able to interact with it?
Done properly, it can be quite fun. Take a look at Majesty. You place your buildings ane recruit heroes, but you have no direct control over them. You can influence them and the world using spells and reward flags, but the heroes do their own little thing. While it can get frustrating, it's still one of my favorite games.
Make sure there is adequate ventilation and a bunch of automatic air fresheners. Seriously. While it might be a broad generalization, anyone who spent time down in the WotC center on the Ave in Seattle will know what I'm talking about.
I mean speak up if you do, but I don't know ANYONE who has anything but bad things to say about Fileplanet. (I also don't know anyone who is a member either.)
I was a member and I have nothing bad to say about Fileplanet. Downloads for new releases were fast and easy to get. The only reason I stopped subscribing was because I got a deal on FileShack's premium service through my DSL provider.
As for the exclusivity? No big deal. So maybe I wait a week or two until it gets spread around or they put it up for non-subscribers. Oddly enough, I'll survive.
IIRC for a game to achieve this status it has to sell at least a million copies. Then sony automatically makes it a greatest hits title, or did they change this?
I believe a game has to sell at least 400,000 copies and be available for more than nine months. And as someone else pointed out, it's not automatic.
The biggest challenge to all three of these is to make sure the boys, not the fathers, do the bulk of the work.
One year, my dad was too busy to help me with any aspects of the car. He had decided that using stop watches to time the races was archaic(early 80's). He got ahold of the track, rigged up the starting gate with a switch, photosensors at the finish line, and built out a breadboard to report each lane's time.
As to the Ask Google trolls - I've asked Google and 90% of the links are pages that happen to have LED, Christmas, and light on the same page but do NOT have any content related to LED Christmas lights.
Try searching for "led holiday lights". With quotes.
Search engines have supported quoted phrase searching for quite some time now. I'm always surprised at the number of people who don't know about it (or have failed to read any searching tip/faq page, such as Google's).
Agreed. Anyone catch the live action version of Fist of the North Star that came out a few years back? Ugh. Didn't even come close to catching the feeling of the original.
We use meta tags as well to aid htdig indexing for local searches. A user might search on an abbreviated keyword that doesn't show up in the page itself, so we just drop in a meta tag.
Something not yet mentioned... watch the smell. Seriously.
Anyone in the Seattle area ever go down to the (now-defunct) Wizards of the Coast game center in the U District? Remember the smell? There were about 30 computers (pumping out a fair bit of heat), and a number of unwashed geeks either on the computers or playing MtG. It got ugly.
My Rio 500 has been running strong for three years now. Of the four portable mp3 players I own, it's the one I use most because of its small size and light weight.
Yes, it only has 64 megs onboard, and yes, the audio manager sucks, but it's so much easier to tote around than the Nomad Jukebox (original 6 gig version) or any of the cd-rom based players. It's even survived drops from a few feet up onto the street (whereupon it reset itself, but was otherwise unscathed).
That's part of the problem. They're only releasing "good games". IMHO, I haven't seen a truely standout game yet, ala MGS2 or GTA3.
Hopefully by the end of the year, a few great games will be out for the GC and Xbox, but can they afford to wait that long before public support dwindles?
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I've always been a fan of Hulk's Diary that is on the Internet.
virt did a few a capella game tunes a while back (bottom of the page).
Have you tried motion sickness wristbands? They just put pressure on a specific point on your wrist, but they've helped me in the past while on boats.
If you just want people to play it, I'd try places such as freshmeat, or the forums at gamedev.net or flipcode.com.
For those interested in watching the show, you can download episodes from the Total War Center forums if you're a registered member (free reg).
Switching gears, Jayson Stark wrote a short bit in a column on Schilling's EQ habit a few years ago.
There's what appears to be a modified version at http://www.webcodesign.de/the_whitehat_project/ which requires VC6 to compile it "painlessly" (according to the readme).
Make sure there is adequate ventilation and a bunch of automatic air fresheners. Seriously. While it might be a broad generalization, anyone who spent time down in the WotC center on the Ave in Seattle will know what I'm talking about.
As for the exclusivity? No big deal. So maybe I wait a week or two until it gets spread around or they put it up for non-subscribers. Oddly enough, I'll survive.
I finished last.
But my time was accurate to 1/100 second.
Search engines have supported quoted phrase searching for quite some time now. I'm always surprised at the number of people who don't know about it (or have failed to read any searching tip/faq page, such as Google's).
Agreed. Anyone catch the live action version of Fist of the North Star that came out a few years back? Ugh. Didn't even come close to catching the feeling of the original.
We use meta tags as well to aid htdig indexing for local searches. A user might search on an abbreviated keyword that doesn't show up in the page itself, so we just drop in a meta tag.
Something not yet mentioned... watch the smell. Seriously.
Anyone in the Seattle area ever go down to the (now-defunct) Wizards of the Coast game center in the U District? Remember the smell? There were about 30 computers (pumping out a fair bit of heat), and a number of unwashed geeks either on the computers or playing MtG. It got ugly.
My Rio 500 has been running strong for three years now. Of the four portable mp3 players I own, it's the one I use most because of its small size and light weight.
Yes, it only has 64 megs onboard, and yes, the audio manager sucks, but it's so much easier to tote around than the Nomad Jukebox (original 6 gig version) or any of the cd-rom based players. It's even survived drops from a few feet up onto the street (whereupon it reset itself, but was otherwise unscathed).
Unfortunately, he had to pull the album from his site due to excessive downloads. There's still a good sampling of songs on mp3.com.
Alternatively, you can buy both his albums from CDBaby or Amazon.
Hopefully by the end of the year, a few great games will be out for the GC and Xbox, but can they afford to wait that long before public support dwindles?
Eh, that's still a bad analogy, because you're not being paid to write the paper. Artists (typically) get royalties for their music.
Here is the Wired article on it. The article was originally in the March 2002 magazine, which focused on AI (gaming and otherwise).
Half-Life is based on both the Quake I and II engines. They (Valve) started work with Quake I and added in bits of Quake II where necessary.
See PlanetHalfLife's FAQ for a bit more detail.